Re: Ada's ranking of popularity at IEEE Spectrum

[Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>]

On 2014-07-06, Dan'l Miller <optikos@verizon.net> wrote:
> http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programming-languages
>
> Ada is the 36th most-popular language.  The over-arching goal of Ada202X
> should be to figure out how to attract more developers, both grand visions and
> low-hanging fruit.  For example, would a first-order-logic library attract
> Prolog programmers?

I've read the responses posted at the time of writing this and once
again, everyone is missing the point. Your number one issue are the
compilers. There's no point introducing all new libraries if people
cannot use them in all the environments they are used to.

My current number one example: implementing OpenSSL in Ada is exactly
the kind of thing Ada would be good at. Unfortunately, it's also not
practical.

People can rely on a freely available C compiler been everywhere and
that language plays _very_ well with code written in a wide range of
other languages (even while making it equally easy to introduce
enormous security holes :-().

That's one of the reasons why libraries are written in C instead of
a better language. People want to write code they can use with a wide
range of languages/platforms/targets.

Another example: image libraries like libjpeg and other image libraries
are used _everywhere_. For that same reason, you can forget about
reducing any security issues by rewriting them in Ada.

One of the ways to make Ada popular is to get people to start using
libraries written in Ada in their non-Ada code (and hopefully then
eventually their Ada code after they become interested in Ada). You
can't do that until you have Ada compilers which are as widespread as C.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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